To take a look at our Main Ingredient blogs, follow the link: http://adamastorbacchus.blogspot.com/because to tell our whole story here would take too
much space and you can also read earlier blogs. Click on underlined and Bold wordsin the text of this editionto
open links to pictures, blogs, pertinent websites or more information.
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Main Ingredient's On Line Shop is performing very well. We
are continuing to update it with new products and with photographs of products.
Please do not
pay until we have confirmed availability and invoiced you. When you
make an eft payment, make sure that it says who you are. Use the form on the
website to email us your order and we will send you the final invoice once
we’ve made sure stock is available. Click here to see the shop.

This week’s Product menu One of the best condiments we can recommend is our range of French
mustards. We have them from two producers: Vilux and Edmond Fallot. The latter
produces mustards which are much more like the hot English mustards, but with
one wonderful difference: as well as the traditional smooth and grainy Dijon
mustards, we have mustards blended with herbs and fruits like tarragon, basil, green peppercorn and
blackcurrant. The Vilux mustard range includes white truffle, gingerbread,
champagne and honey mustards. So we have something for almost every palate. The
tarragon mustard can be blended with butter and inserted under the skin of a
chicken before roasting. It imparts the most wonderful flavour. Try it and
enjoy! See them here.

We have a lot of fun putting MENU together each week and, of course, doing
the things we write about, but making it possible for you to enjoy rare and
wonderful gourmet foods is what drives our business. We stock a good range of ingredients and
delicious ready-made gourmet foods. You can contact us by emailor phone, or through our website.
We can send your requirements to you anywhere in South Africa.

Our market activities Come and visit us at the Old
Biscuit Mill’s wonderfully exciting, atmospheric Neighbourgoods
Market, as always, this
Saturday and every Saturday between
09h00 and 14h00. Tip: Some visitors tell us how they struggle to
find parking. It’s quite easy if you know how. Click here for a map which shows
where we park. We will be back at the market in Long Beach Mall, Sun Valley,
Fish Hoek on Friday
March 22nd. Our April dates
will be Fridays 12th and 19th.

We send
our felicitations to all who are celebrating your religious holy days this
weekend, particularly Easter and Passover. Thank you to everyone who has send
greetings to us; they have come from many corners of the earth.

Easter This holiday is certainly time to spend with
your family. We are going to meet our great
niece for the first time. Our nephew, Richard, is here from Johannesburg to run
the Two
Oceans ultra marathon and he has brought his wife and
daughter with him. Our daughter, Clare, will join us. Lynne will be cooking a
fairly traditional gammon and hoping that the weather improves tomorrow, some salads
for lunch, hopefully out on the deck looking at the sea. We have a panettone,
so there may well be one of those wonderfully vanilla bread and butter puddings
as well. The rest of the weekend, after a hopefully very busy day at the
Biscuit Mill on Saturday, where we hope to see lots of you, will probably be
nice and quiet - and restful, as we are heading for another busy period after
it.

Taste of Cape Town competition We have received an unprecedented number of
entries with correct answers to the question we asked in the competition to win
tickets to the Taste of Cape Town. The right answer was, of course, the Green
Point Cricket Club. Answers such as “Cape Town” didn’t cut the mustard, Dijon
or otherwise. We have sent the names of the ten lucky people in our draw to the
organisers, who will contact the winners. Thank you to all the entrants, some
of whom sent in several emails. We would only accept the first. We are very
grateful for your interest and participation.

The Hurst Campus We
are always delighted to be invited to the graduation ceremony of a good
culinary academy and to see the new generation
of chefs and hospitality professionals graduate. This year’s graduation at The
Hurst Campus – formerly known as The Culinary Academy - was held at Allée Bleue
near Franschhoek on Tuesday evening and we believe that there are some very
interesting and keen graduates entering the hospitality market. We do hope that
there are jobs available for all these talented youngsters; they certainly have
had good training. They follow a long line of excellent chefs working at some
top restaurants, here and abroad. We
were very interested to learn that The Hurst Campus has become the first such
academy in Africa to receive an international endorsement and gain admission as
a member of the renowned French Institut Paul Bocuse Worldwide Alliance. Director
Rebecca Hurst has some new and exciting plans afoot for the Hurst Academy and
we will be announcing them in the near future. Click here to see some photographs.
To learn more about The Hurst Campus look here.

New wine to taste We are often sent samples of wines by the
wine industry, so that we can taste them and write about them. We recently
received two of the new wines released by Weltevrede Estate in Bonnievale,
who are currently celebrating their 100th birthday. Following the launch of
their Vanilla Chardonnay in 2011, which is growing in popularity every day,
Weltevrede have added three equally delectable siblings to their strikingly
simplistic family of wines: the Weltevrede Tropico Sauvignon Blanc 2012,
Cherrychoc Merlot 2012 and Cigarbox Shiraz 2012. They are aimed at the easy
drinking market and are priced from R57 for the whites and R68 for the reds
from their online store. We tasted the
Tropico and the Cherrychoc Merlot.

The general public is, apparently, asking for much
more tropical flavours in its Sauvignons Blanc. We have to confess that this is
not the style we want to drink; we like the classic expression of the grape - being
lean and crisp, fragrant and full of minerality. However, Tropico is a very
easy-to-quaff white wine, full of melon and guava, more like a Chenin to us
than a Sauvignon, but we did like it. The Cherrychoc Merlot will definitely
appeal to the wider market; it is soft and smooth with some body and will
fulfil all your expectations as it
tastes exactly as it says “on the box”: full of sweet cherries and milk
chocolate. We had it with the boerewors we made and they were a delicious match.

Idiotic liquor law – Part Two After eleven
years of happy trading in the V&A Waterfront, Caroline Rillema is closing
that store, and moving it elsewhere. She will, of course, continue trading from
her Strand Street store. High rentals and the new shorter trading hours imposed
by the Liquor Board and the Cape Town City Council are her main reasons, with a
prohibition on Sunday trading being a particular concern. The new trading conditions
were scheduled to come into effect at midnight on Monday. And now, just as she
is proceeding with the dreadful drudgery of closing the shop, our blessed City
Council announced an about turn yesterday, succumbing to pressure from a host
of potential voters who have said that they are likely to change their votes at
the next election. Democracy works. They were vociferous in saying how
important it was to prohibit liquor sales on Sundays, but they have now decided
that they will consider allowing Sunday trading for businesses with current
Sunday licences in non-residential areas and that condition is in abeyance.
They really are a pathetic bunch of clowns. We have been saying, since these
new licensing conditions were first mooted several years ago, that they were
badly thought out, hit the people least likely to abuse alcohol, will have no
effect on the thousands of illicit shebeens and will be largely unenforceable.
But the about face will be welcomed by Vaughan Johnson, who has been vociferous
about it in the media (well done Vaughan!), Harley’s Liquors (who planned court
action) and several others and, of course, by people like us.

Of
prime concern to many of us who have large collections of wine is the stupid
clause, still in the legislation, that no one may have no more than 150 litres
(about 200 bottles) of any alcoholic beverages. This may seem a lot to many of
you, but we like to be able to choose a suitable wine to match something Lynne
is preparing in the kitchen and to have that wine properly matured, which
almost certainly means that it is older than anything we can buy from the
retail trade. Many of us have proper wine cellars with more than 200 bottles in
them. We certainly don’t plan to have a party and drink all our wine in one
massive binge. The people who proposed this law obviously drink wine from 5
litre boxes, or something similar, if they drink wine at all. We wrote about
building a wine cellar in Classic Wine last year and some of
you will, no doubt, remember the article.

Back to Caroline - closing the shop entails a terrible
waste of beautiful shopfitting and paraphernalia and she would like to partner
someone in a franchise or similar agreement in a new location which can use
them. You can contact her through her website www.carolineswine.com. Bargain
hunters can benefit from the closing of her Waterfront store. She is holding a Final Saleon Saturday,
Sunday and Monday this Easter weekend (30th March to 1st April). There is
a discount of 20% off all wines, and 30% off all spirits. No e-mail orders or
deliveries, cash/credit card & carry only. Call Lara or Lieze for more
information at 021 425 5701.

Weekend guests You may have sudden guests this weekend,
so Lynne thought you might like a quick one dish recipe to help you. It takes
about an hour and a quarter to cook. You can make it the previous day and heat
and add the spring onions just before you serve. Add more chilli if you like
the heat.

Heat the oil in a casserole over a high heat and stir fry
the garlic, onion and lemongrass for about a minute. Add the beef and stir fry
till it has some colour. Add five spice powder and fry for a minute. Add the stock, soy, fish sauce, chilli, palm
sugar and mix well. Cover, and lower the heat to a gentle simmer for about an
hour. Check that it doesn’t dry up. Add a little water, if necessary, to keep
moist. When the meat is tender, add the spring onions and black pepper to taste
and cook for a further three minutes. Garnish
with fresh coriander sprigs and serve with rice, baby corns, mange tout, and
baby carrots.

There is a huge and rapidly growing
variety of interesting things to occupy your leisure time here in the Western
Cape. There
are so many interesting things to do in our world of food and wine that we have
made separate list for each month for which we have information.To see what’s happening in our world of
food and wine (and a few other cultural events), visitour Events Calendar.
All the events are listed in date order and we already have a large number of
exciting events to entertain you right through the year.

Learn about wine and cooking
We receive a lot of enquiries from people who want to learn more about wine. Cathy Marston and The Cape Wine Academy both run wine
education courses, some very serious and others more geared to fun. You can see
details of Cathy’s WSET and other courses here and here and the CWA courses here.

Chez Gourmet in Claremont has a programme of
cooking classes. A calendar of their classes can be seen here.
Pete Ayub, who makes our very popular Prego sauce, runs evening cooking classes at Sense of Taste, his
catering company in Maitland. We can recommend them very highly, having enjoyed
his seafood course. Check
his programme here. Nadège Lepoittevin-Dasse has cooking
classes in Fish Hoek and conducts cooking tours to Normandy. You can see more details here. Emma
Freddi runs the Enrica Rocca cooking courses at her
home in Constantia. Brett Nussey’s Stir Crazy courses are now being
run from Dish Food and Social’s premises in Main Road Observatory (opposite
Groote Schuur hospital).

28th March 2013

Remember- if you can’t find something,
we’ll do our best to get it for you, and, if you’re in Cape Town or elsewhere
in the country, we can send it to you! Check our product list for details and
prices.

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About us

MENU,our weekly email newsletter, started as an advertising medium for Main Ingredient, our specialist retail grocery business. We opened our Sea Point shop in December 2002 because the limited range of food products available in the supermarkets frustrated us. We realised that there was a place in South Africa for a grocer catering to people who share our tastes and needs. We moved the shop on line in 2010, but have now discontinued it, having decided that it is time to “retire” and concentrate on our writing, photography and tour guiding. MENU has a wide circulation and is read nationally and internationally.

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